ULA to launch first nationwide safety mission on a Vulcan rocket – Spaceflight Now

More than 4 months after it was licensed to fly nationwide safety payloads for the United States authorities, United Launch Alliance is on the cusp of launching simply such a mission with its Vulcan rocket.

The 202-foot-tall (61 m) rocket will launch a pair of satellites on a mission collectively known as United States Space Force (USSF)-106. The two-stage rocket will fly on a trajectory that can take it due east from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

“This mission is heading directly to geoscynchronous orbit and will be one of our longest missions to date,” stated Gary Wentz, the vice chairman of Government and Commercial Programs for ULA throughout a prelaunch teleconference. “It was purposefully designed to support these missions, direct inject to GEO for the Space Force. This is our 101st mission for national security space and we’re proud to deliver the majority of our country’s critical satellites to orbit.”

On Monday, ULA rolled the rocket a couple of third of a mile from the federal government Vertical Integration Facility (VIF-G) to the pad at Space Launch Complex 41. The journey took somewhat greater than an hour from first movement to settling down on the pad.

Spaceflight Now could have dwell protection of this mission starting about 1.5 hours forward of liftoff, which is scheduled for 7:59 p.m. EDT (2359 UTC), the opening of a one-hour lengthy window. This livestream will even comprise protection of the countdown and launch for Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket, which has an instantaneous launch time of 8:37 p.m. EDT (0037 UTC).

The forty fifth Weather Squadron forecast an 80 % probability for favorable climate through the hour-long launch window, with cumulus clouds and photo voltaic exercise being the 2 potential impacts.

The mission would be the third launch for therefore far for ULA in 2025. The first two being Atlas 5 rockets that carried a complete of 54 satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation.

Returning to nationwide safety area launches

The launch of the USSF-106 mission comes a couple of years after it was initially meant to fly, however critically marks ULA’s return to launching payloads as a part of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program for the Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

Its final such launch, utilizing an Atlas 5 rocket, was the USSF-51 mission, which launched somewhat greater than a yr in the past on July 30, 2024. A decade previous to that, following Russia’s preliminary invasion of Ukraine, U.S. launch suppliers have been required to chop ties with Russian-made engines and shift to American-built {hardware}.

That put ULA on the trail to creating Vulcan and Northrop Grumman to maneuver away from its Antares 230+ rocket, additionally powered by engines with heritage from the previous Soviet Union.

After years of growth and two certification flights, ULA’s Vulcan rocket was cleared to fly NSSL payloads.

“We’re excited to be here today. Pretty historic point in our program’s history,” stated Col. James Horne We formally finish our reliance on Russian-made engines with this launch and we proceed to keep up our assured entry to area with two, impartial — no less than two impartial —rocket service firms that we will leverage to get our capabilities in orbit.”

Getting Vulcan cleared to fly wasn’t a easy course of although. An anomaly with one of many nozzles on a Northrop Grumman-built stable rocket motor through the second certification mission in October 2024 brought on a months-long delay in ending certification to start launching NSSL missions.

“We worked very closely with the ULA and Northrop Grumman teams, as we always do in those sorts of situations. We’ve done a couple of full-scale static fires, extensive sub-scale analysis and modeling to get to launch [Tuesday] at an acceptable risk,” Horne stated. “So, that’s the method that we needed to work by means of as we bought prepared for this mission and we dealt with that by our mission-specific certification course of.

“So we certified the design of the vehicle in March and then we worked through our mission-specific risk analysis to get to launch [on Tuesday.]”



He stated moreover, the Space Force additionally seemed carefully at a number of different elements of the rocket, like the 2 Blue Origin-built BE-4 engines that energy the Vulcan booster at liftoff, on condition that it was a model new engine that flew for the primary time on a Vulcan rocket.

“I think we got excellent data from Cert-2 that showed just how capable of an engine that is with its ability to overcome the issue we saw with the SRB,” Horne stated. “We qualified a lot of new structures on this rocket: the tanks and the composite interstage adapters and heat shields and things like that.”

Horne stated whereas Vulcan is now licensed to fly what he known as “A and B missions,” the Space Force remains to be within the means of certifying the so-called “heavy version” of the Vulcan rocket, which sports activities six stable rocket motors.

ULA’s first launch with six solids will probably be a flight for Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation, which can launch 45 of these broadband satellites into low Earth orbit. Horne stated that flight alone gained’t be enough to realize certification for the Vulcan on this configuration.

“The Kuiper launch will factor into certification, for final certification for the pad out of Vandenberg and for that variant of Vulcan to launch from that, but there’ll be further analysis and certification activities related to the heavy launch and ULA has a good schedule and pace for that,” Horne stated. “That will be in advance of any heavy missions that we need.”

After it launches the USSF-106 mission, the subsequent NSSL flight for ULA will probably be USSF-87. A launch date for the mission hasn’t been introduced, however final week ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno stated there may very well be a few Atlas 5 rocket launches earlier than the subsequent nationwide safety mission.

Upgrading GPS

The USSF-106 mission is comprised of two satellites. One of these stays a thriller with Space Force officers unwilling to supply any particulars throughout Monday’s prelaunch information briefing.

The different, which is described as the first payload onboard the Vulcan rocket is the brainchild of the Air Force Research Laboratory and is named the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3). The mission and launch collectively include a $250 million price ticket.

Dr. Joanna Hicks, a senior analysis aerospace engineer inside the AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate and principal investigator for the NTS-3 stated she’s excited to lastly launch a satellite tv for pc that she’s helped work on for years.

It follows within the footsteps of NTS-1 and NTS-2, which have been launched within the Nineteen Seventies.

“This is the first experimental navigation satellite in 48 years. The last one was NTS-2 that launched in 1977,” Hicks stated. “At the lab, we think that we are overdue for an experiment in this area. GPS is such an integral part of our lives today… and with NTS-3, we are going to be experimenting with a number of different technologies that look at how we can continue to evolve and augment GPS to make sure that it remains the gold standard that our war fighters need.”

Once deployed from Vulcan’s Centaur higher stage, the NTS-3 satellite tv for pc will take a pair weeks for checkouts and commissioning on orbit earlier than it may possibly begin its work. Hicks stated she and her workforce would conduct greater than 100 PNT (place, navigation, timing) experiments that might assist increase the GPS system.

Some of these experiments embody higher time-keeping strategies and testing an electronically steerable phased array antenna, which Hicks stated will assist “deliver higher power to get through interference to the location where it’s needed.” Another is named Chimera, which the AFRL stated is supposed to “jointly authenticate satellite orbit data and measurements of the range between the satellite and user, to provide an extremely robust protection against GPS spoofing for civil users.”

“As a reprogrammable architecture, we don’t have to have everything planned out before we go on orbit and before we see what the threats are,” Hicks stated. “This is not just on the satellite side. We’re pairing that with reprogrammable user equipment that’s able to receive new signals that we’ve defined even after we’ve launched. So we’re very excited about that.”

The prime contractor that manufactured the satellite tv for pc is L3Harris Technologies, which constructed upon Northrop Grumman’s ESPAStar satellite tv for pc bus. The firm was reportedly awarded an $84 million contract for the spacecraft in 2018, which handed its important design evaluation in 2020.

At that time, launch was anticipated in 2022. However, the satellite tv for pc wasn’t delivered to AFRL’s integration and check facility at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico till January 2023, which shifted the deliberate launch date to later that yr.

“L3Harris, as the prime contractor for the program, has been responsible for the design, development, integration and test of the space vehicle,” stated Andrew Builta, the vice chairman of Strategy and Business Development at L3Harris Technologies. “We also developed a portion of the ground control segment, supported launch vehicle integration, integration with the control and user segment and will support on orbit operations.”



The varied exams will contain work each within the laboratory in addition to out within the area. Hicks stated a few of the learns from this, like calibrating a spot beam antenna might be utilized to the subsequent technology of GPS satellites, known as GPS 3-F, that are being developed and constructed by Lockheed Martin.

“One of the things that NTS-3 is testing… is the multi-orbit constellation concept,” Hicks stated. “So, can we obtain alerts from NTS-3 at GEO in addition to GPS at MEO (medium Earth orbit) and reap the benefits of all of them. Maybe sooner or later, we’ll be capable of put a few of these applied sciences in LEO, for instance.

“We don’t currently have that as a planned mission, but that’s something that could conceivably happen in the future.”